EMPLOYMENT
AND PAY

EMPLOYMENT


Most creators working in comics today are SELF-EMPLOYED, and NOT employed by the company that publishes their work. Of course there are exceptions to this, but this is true for the vast majority of creators working in comics today. This SELF-EMPLOYMENT has many implications:
  • Creators are free to work at home or in their own studio
  • Creators are free to live anywhere in the world (business is done by phone, fax, and overnight mail)
  • Creators set their own working schedules within the requirements of the deadline
  • Creators can determine to work for any project/publisher they want!
  • Creators can be easily removed from working on a project/publisher!
  • No investment options like 401K
  • Creators are also responsible for the employer's half of the Social Security taxes owed to the IRS (and at 7.5% of income, they can be sizable!)
  • Creators are responsible for their own insurance programs
  • No paid vacation or sick days!
  • Creators can earn royalties based on sales of their work
Creators that accept contracts may earn additional benefits. Accepting an exclusive contract, that is, an agreement to ONLY work for the contracted company, may result in:
  • Higher page rates
  • Performance bonuses
  • Eligibility to participate with the company's health insurance plan



PAY


Based on discussions with a few people "in-the-know" about the current pay rates, the following summary reasonably represents the pay scales among the industry's bigger publishers.

THIS IS A GUIDE, REALLY, AND NOT MEANT TO BE USED IN ANY NEGOTIATIONS YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF IN!

Artists get paid by the page (in fact, so do most other creators like writers, letterers, colorists). A typical comic book is 22 pages of interior art, and 1 page of cover art. Covers (and pin-up illustrations) usually pay a little better than the interior art pages -- so for this example, let's just estimate that the pay for one cover (or for one pin-up) is 1.5 times the pay for one interior art page. Doing the math yields one full comic at approximately 23.5 page rates (22 interior page rates + 1.5 page rates for the cover).

Here is a GUIDE for PENCILING page rates:

Beginning rates
 $80/page - $100/page $1880/comic - $2350/comic
After 5 working years
 $175/page - $200/page $4112.50/comic - $4700/comic
Contracts
 $225/page - up $5287.50/comic - up



Inkers


Page rates for inkers are less than those shown above for pencilers (I'm guessing it's maybe 60%-75% of the rates for pencilers). You should also know that the current industry does not support many (if any) contracts to inkers.


ART RETURNS


Not only do you get paid to create the art, but the art is returned to the creators. As long as the creators do not republish the art, they are free to either keep it or to sell it (again, under the stipulation that it is not do be republished).

Most companies return 2/3 of the art to the penciler, and 1/3 of the art to the inker. The exact method of determining which pages go where can be different, but the balance of pages returned is pretty much the same. Some companies shuffle the art, and select pages at random. Others simply pluck 1/3 off the book, one month from the front, one month from the back, and so on. Covers are returned similarly: usually, from 3 consecutive covers, 2 consecutive covers are returned to the penciler, and the 3rd goes back to the inker.